Service provider networks contain a number of network components including base-stations, radio network controllers, Mobility Management Entity, Serving Gateway, Packet Data Network Gateway, session boarder controllers, Voice over IP servers, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystems), etc. Upon such a network infrastructure, services like Video Optimization, Web Caching etc. are widely deployed. These network components (nodes) and network services are individually tested in lab environments for a number of aspects such as protocol compliance, performance, and load capacity, and are also tested during the initial phases of a network rollout with these components. However, factors like network growth and the dynamics in user traffic or impact from new devices cause network conditions to change rapidly after deployment, meaning that there is a need to understand the effects of these changes on the entire network topology.
Traditionally, two approaches are followed to tackle such network changes: First, “reactive” fixes to network topologies or network policies after some problematic event occurs, which is often too late. These events or conditions are often detected with large and expensive Network Monitoring Systems. Second, drive tests and testing with real mobile devices, which is limited in load, coverage, functionality and prohibitively expensive.
Additionally, these methods make it difficult to realistically simulate all network conditions in an accurate way. Consequently, the current state-of-the-art does not, in reality, allow such live network tests after deployment.
In the future, service provider network testing becomes even more imperative, since the trend is to provide communication functionality as software as an on-demand service like in networks, enabled for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) (which can be combined with Software Defined Networking (SDN)). SDN describes possibilities to change the routing of packets in an NFV enabled network, but that routing may not necessarily be done via software, but can also be done by hardware routers. Following any NFV enabled network or the combined SDN and NFV network are named as “SDN/NFV enabled network” (SDN/NFV means SDN and/or NFV).
These new network architectures introduce requirements on dynamic deployment and runtime management of both the virtualized network elements/functions and network services based on the virtualized network infrastructure connecting them. These “networks in a cloud” introduce new needs for testing as the technologies enable now to roll-out new network functions very rapidly on demand. Thus the complexity of networks as well as the sheer number of network functions to be managed increases and changes greatly. The ability to test new virtual function deployments on the fly needs to adapt to this large growth.